Freedesktop.org in Google Summer of Code

[Thiago Macieira]

Google announced last night the list of organisations[1] that were accepted 
for the Summer of Code programme of this year. For those not aware of it, 
within Summer of Code, organisations select a number of students from all 
parts of the world to work on certain projects for three months. In return, 
Google pays $4500 to this student and donates $500 to the mentoring 
organisation.

The whole idea is to get students involved in Open Source/Free Software during 
their vacations, which they might otherwise spend in a Summer job. For more 
information, please see the website.

Freedesktop.org did not apply as an organisation. There are many reasons for  
this, the most important one being that freedesktop.org is an informal group  
of developers working on a really diverse number of projects and  
specifications. But that doesn't mean projects linked to Freedesktop.org 
don't have a chance.

Like last year, both GNOME and KDE are accepting proposals for projects 
related to freedesktop.org tools and libraries. Both organisations have said 
they will reserve a number of slots for fd.o-related initiatives, but we 
cannot yet say how many that will be. It will depend on the quality of the 
proposals that are received, as well as the total number of slots that Google 
allocates to us.

This of course doesn't mean KDE and GNOME are taking over fd.o activities: it 
just seems a natural way for us to extend the reach of our organisations to 
projects that we use, depend on or simply improve the quality of the Free 
Desktop experience. Students are free to apply wherever that makes sense. For 
example, in the list of accepted organisations, you'll find many Linux 
distributions as well as three BSDs and some umbrella organisations; some of 
those other organisations may have specific goals that may involve fd.o 
projects and we'll be glad to see fd.o-related projects mentored by them.

So, what we ask from you is that you think of ideas that you may want to have 
developed by students. Our wiki pages[2][3] are open for editing, or you may 
create a wiki page of your own and add a link in ours.

We would also like to hear suggestions on how fd.o project mentors would want 
to participate in rating the applications and how students should apply 
(whether it's to one of the two orgs or both of them).

If you have any question, please contact:
	Thiago Macieira - thiago at kde.org
	Vincent Untz - vuntz at gnome.org

[1] http://code.google.com/soc/2008/
[2] http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2008/Ideas
[3] http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/Summer_of_Code/2008/Ideas

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
    PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
    E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
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